The Performance Max Moment Is Coming to TV: How Tatari Max Changes the Way Advertisers Buy CTV

If you run paid search with automated intelligence, you know how this goes. You give Google's Performance Max a goal and a budget, and it works out the rest. Meta's Advantage+ does the same for paid social, and Amazon's Performance+ has a similar product for mobile and display.

These tools caught on because they deliver efficient outcomes, with closed-loop measurement that ties ad exposure to real purchases. In a few short years, "Max" went from a product name to an advertiser category. TV was left out. Until now.

Enter Tatari Max

Today we're launching Tatari Max, the new way to directly buy CTV inventory that benefits everyone - advertisers and publishers. Tatari Max is an AI optimization engine for premium, direct-sold inventory that decides at the ad-server level which impression goes to which campaign, so each lands where it's most likely to perform. It's built on Upstream, our sister company’s supply-side technology automating direct-sold campaigns, which is integrated straight into a publisher ad server. Think of Upstream as the pipes to premium inventory, and Tatari Max as the intelligence on top. We truly believe it’s going to change the face of TV advertising.

How Tatari Max Works

The intelligence comes from Tatari's Foundational TV Data set, nearly a decade of measured TV outcomes: 300 terabytes of response data, 180 million conversion events a day, and more than $9 billion in managed spend across roughly 1,600 networks, all aggregated and anonymized. These aren't simply large language models. They're ad performance prediction models trained on that data to predict which impressions will drive results before a campaign even starts.

Tatari Max weighs privacy-safe signals about each impression, such as device, context, and demographics, and combines them into an Affinity Score: how well that impression fits a brand's ad. The highest score wins, because it's the one most likely to drive the outcome the brand wants, whether it’s a site visit, a sign-up, or a purchase.

What This Means for TV Advertisers

Better results from the same campaigns

In testing, campaigns running Tatari Max delivered a 19% median improvement in incremental CPA across dozens of campaigns, and every measured outcome feeds the next decision, so the engine keeps learning.

For activewear and lifestyle apparel company Rhoback, Max-optimized streaming between August and September drove 32% more purchases and 10% more site visits, measured on Tatari's view-through attribution (visits and purchases within 28 days of seeing the ad). Rylo, the AI-powered communication platform, saw 36% more conversions than standard direct buys.

That’s a significant improvement to traditional direct media buying, and offers a powerful complement to programmatic buying.

More reach, not less

Programmatic targeting draws hard lines; for example, buying only where the viewer is a woman aged 20 to 25. Max weighs hundreds of data points that express affinity instead, so nothing is cut off at the edge and it finds responsive households that filters would never reach.

Allocation, not auctions

Tatari Max allocates direct-sold inventory to the best-fit advertiser, so no auction drives the price. With direct supply, there are no intermediary fees, the inventory is premium, brand safety is built in, and fraud risk is zero.

Simple to set up

Set your goal and budget and launch, like any direct buy. There's no new tool or process to adopt.

Proof you can validate

Tatari leading measurement attribution measures results, and you can use the measurement partner of your choice to verify them.

Where Tatari Max Goes Next

Google and Meta's Max products share one promise: give us the goal, and we find the best path. Tatari Max is that promise built for TV, on premium inventory, across publishers rather than inside one company's walls. It's live today on major publishers including NBCUniversal, Skydance Advertising (formerly Paramount Advertising and Warner Bros. Discovery Advertising), Disney, and Tubi. And we’re rapidly adding new publishers and capabilities. Soon, advertisers won't choose between direct and programmatic, or linear and streaming. They'll set a goal, and Max will find the best way to reach it.

Want to see what Tatari Max can do for your next campaign? Get started!